


It Is To Be

by deathwailart



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Backstory, Character Study, Gen, Pre-Canon, Qunari
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-07
Updated: 2014-12-07
Packaged: 2018-02-28 12:55:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2733317
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathwailart/pseuds/deathwailart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Beira Adaar reflects on life as a mage and mercenary, being Qunari and yet not Qunari and the meaning of asit tal-eb.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It Is To Be

Her parents once knew a different life where they had no name and instead a place, a rank, a role, many minds working as a whole. They have names now but to the Qunari, to the people that are and aren't her people at the same time, they are Tal-Vashoth. She is Beira, a name her mother agonised over – she was a series of nicknames until the age of two, she was little one and little horn, little girl, running one, smiling one, laughing one. She was named Beira in her father's arms, the third one to hold her instead of being a name on some file held by Tamassrans. Beira is not Qunari (and yet she is), she is not even Tal-Vashoth but simply (and yet not) Vashoth. She is grey and yet she is not. She is a woman who was a girl who rode up on her father's head when she wanted to see the world. She is a girl who learned how to climb high by standing on her mother's horns. She is Beira Adaar, she is Vashoth and she is Valo-kas.  
  
If only it were really so simple.  
  
Her parents picked the name Adaar together. They're not married by any law that would recognise them, still living their own strange version of the Qun to this day but it's always been them against everything. She didn't ask why they picked the name that they did but she knows her father fought once, that he was Karasaad once and her mother told her how he wore paint across his body, perfect lines of red, the slits on the visor of his helmet. Her mother never says what she did, she is tight-lipped but Beira knows, knows that it is the only way they could have met, could have run from the Qun together and she's heard bits and pieces from the rest of the people she knows to know exactly what her mother was. Perhaps it is why her mother has always said her life is her own choice when she must feel the weight of all those she shaped before Beira. Beira is her own flesh and blood, perhaps that is enough. Except not always. She remembers the times they fought, when her mother would say that this is not work for a woman or that she should not complain about something that is her place before her mother catches herself and looks horrified and ashamed. Sometimes Beira is more the parent. The one to say it's okay, to talk it through, her hands squeezing tight.  
  
It was not a bad childhood  
  
Her father taught them all to fight. Her mother had a knowledge of it from the standpoint of someone who once assigned roles – she knew of fighting before they left and on the road she had to take weapons, had to carve a path alongside him to freedom. There was no other choice for Beira really, not even when her magic became obvious to the world. Her mother had become just as fierce as her father with weapons, favouring a blade in either hand, relying on speed and flexibility rather than trying to beat a solid wall of muscle; her scars remain to this day, raised and fish belly white, a stark contrast to her dark grey skin. They are expected on her father but a Qunari woman would have few reasons to bear the marks of weapons but she is yet to meet a Tal-Vashoth woman who has made her way to freedom unmarked; even Beira, born to it, has picked up wounds that she would not have had otherwise. Her father had taught her to fight from as soon as she could stand and hold a stick, drilling her on formation, that she must know it in her muscles and in her bones. She thinks he thought she would wield some two-handed weapon but such things never came to pass.  
  
Beira was eight when they discovered her magic. Sometimes it hurt that her mother called her Saarebas. That for a moment in her life she stopped being Beira and was just a thing. No, not just a thing. A dangerous thing. She recoiled as though Beira had conjured a nest of vipers and other serpents and not that she had simply frozen a small pond so she could slide back and forth over it. Winter had been slow in coming, she remembers, the skies grey and she had been so impatient for snow and the way her parents seemed to delight in it even as they complained. They came from a very hot place, they said, they had never felt cold such as this and the newness of it all was exciting. She always played with the village children when it snowed, throwing snowballs or building little trenches when it fell deep enough, lining up in formation to throw volleys back and forth. Her father would laugh and give instruction when he could and everyone always wanted Beira on their team until she started to grow faster than them and give their position away because they couldn't dig a wall high enough even when she crouched. But she had wanted the cold weather to hurry and when she had reached out to touch the still waters of the pond, ice had spread out from her fingertips and her mother had hissed that word and recoiled before grabbing her hard enough about the arm that it had _hurt_.  
  
She apologised later. She wept and tugged Beira close and said sorry over and over, a word that did not come easily. Beira had been sent to her room and told to stay there until her father returned, a cycle of weeping and trying not to. They'd spoken Qunlat but she hadn't understood it; she spoke common tongue better by necessity and it had been so many things, so many and she hadn't understood only that in the end her mother had apologised and said all would be well and that her father had presented her with a staff of sorts to tell her that they'd be changing her training.  
  
"What we call Saarebas, they call Mage here. It is dang-" her mother had cut herself off, biting her lip and she had never looked so unsure before but it had changed so much, there had ever been a furrow in her mother's brow since that day. "It means dangerous thing back there."  
  
Her father had joined, resting one huge warrior's hand on Beira's shoulder and she never forgot the weight of it. "Here they lock their Mages up in tall towers or other places. We will not let that happen."  
  
"But you must keep quiet. You must be careful."  
  
"From Templars?" She had seen them, they always watched her family like most folk, the strange ox-men and their child, who did not call themselves Qunari and yet that was the kind word most folk knew them by.  
  
"Yes." Father had squeezed her shoulder, tried a smile.  
  
"And more," her mother had added quietly.  
  
She had learned in time of demons and spirits, those things her mother feared so greatly. Each flash of magic would draw a demon and her mother could not protect her in the Fade. If they had all been in Par Vollen or somewhere else controlled by the Qun then she would have been leashed and she tried to imagine it when she could pry the stories from her parents or from the other Tal-Vashoth they eventually joined with, a strange community that learned never to overstay their welcome. She spent years piecing it together. The pauldrons and chains, a face hidden behind a golden mask and a leash for someone to hold. No training though she had no idea if her own was ever any better, self-taught, moving more like some strange blend of rogue and warrior but with fire and lightning and ice. Never spirit magic. Her mother tightened her mouth each time someone mentioned that word, stopped being mother, started being Tamassran. She had overheard them talking once when she had told them how she had learned something new, her excitement and wonder at what she could learn herself with just a few books and time (and sometimes the odd hedge mage they came across), when they had smiled at the table over dinner. _They would cut out her tongue_ , mother had said. _I fought alongside one in Seheron against the Vints. His mouth was stitched shut behind his mask._  
  
Sometimes she would imagine it. Would clamp her tongue between her teeth until it hurt and her eyes stung, never breaking the surface but close. She would press her lips into a thin line and wonder how they would keep her alive. Not thoughts to share. They were to be pitied for what they were but honoured too and she couldn't understand it, where was the honour in having so much stripped from you, in having no choice but the Qun was not choice. One mind, one body, one soul.  
  
Some souls were more equal than others.  
  
She was one of Valo-kas before she ever saw what her fate might have been. Her mother had not approved exactly, worried more about Templars but then she had met Shokrakar who was a hulking thing with one horn shorn off and many scars she had smiled and laughed. She was Tal-Vashoth like them, someone fleeing from Seheron. He had nightmares like her father. There were others, mostly Tal-Vashoth, banding together and making a name for themselves and he had always laughed and slapped her on the back; Adaar meant weapon and Valo-kas meant greatsword and yet here she was freezing foes to shatter them with the killing blow. Kaariss had written a poem and she'd punched him and broken his nose. They roamed far and wide, mostly Free Marches and there were always plenty of jobs, Taarlok smiling as he counted the coin and her parents might have worried for her but she knew they were glad for what she sent back to them. Katoh joined and it was good to have another woman around too, one who had grown up like her and understood as best she could apart from the magic part.  
  
It was she and Shokrakar who had found the Saarebas. They'd fought bandits together who still painted themselves as Qunari and her mouth tasted like metal as she approached the fallen body, her spells slowing it enough for Shokrakar's blade to punch through the belly and up and out between the shoulders. It seemed smaller fallen. The pauldrons had been broken and the wound was a gaping hole as her commander pulled his blade free, giving her a moment as she knelt next to it.  
  
"You need a moment?"  
  
"Stay?"  
  
A nod and she had waited as Beira removed the mask, hissing at how cold the metal was from her ice spells but she had to see, had to gaze upon the ruin of the mouth and there it was, the mouth stitched shut with enough of a gap to be fed and the tears had come. They'd burned the body together with her magic and it was Katoh who later punched Kaariss when he started to compose a new ditty. They'd all gone back off home and she had cried in her mother's arms over it, over what might have been. All of Valo-kas came to pick her up for the next job and she had stood outside with them when they'd been departing, after they had listened to the stories of her parents who still held the Qun close in their own way, who still wanted purpose but a purpose they chose. They were heading off to a new job, some Chantry crap, Conclave, protection. Good pay for standing around as a bunch of humans argued Taarlok said. Hissra (the way her father looked at him, she knew he had only removed one letter to name himself) had said that they would gain advantage in being there, in finding out as much as they could because no one paid mercenaries to think and seldom guarded their tongues around them. It helped that Shokrakar, herself and Taarlok were the ones to do the bulk of the talking, it meant fewer knew that they all understood and spoke far more languages than they would ever expect. Sataa had shrugged but Sataa was one of the newest, a little influx after the Qunari had landed in Kirkwall. She privately agreed that he'd been one of the ones with the Arishok himself.  
  
"Be careful around all those Chantry folk," her father had said with folded arms.  
  
"There's not a Circle anymore, all of them rebelled," she'd replied because they'd gone over that.  
  
"Still, you be safe." Her mother had added with a stern look and she'd rolled her eyes but nodded. The rest had set off, to give her a moment alone, the only one that still kept so close to her family out of all of them.  
  
"Do you-" she'd started only to stop, biting her lip. "No, it's nothing."  
  
"Speak," her mother commanded and she couldn't ever defy her mother, not even after years as a mercenary.  
  
"Do you ever wish I hadn't been a mage? It would have been easier wouldn't it? To not have to worry about me ending up like-"  
  
"Parshaara!" Her mother had stepped forward, cupped her face in both hands. "Asit tal-eb."  
  
"Asit tal-eb," her father echoed and kissed her brow. "We would change nothing."  
  
"Whatever is to come, is to come. The sun rises and sets, the tide goes in and out, we live and we die – these things are to be. You are to be. As you are. As no one else. Beira Adaar. Panahedan."  
  
"Asit tal-eb," she had departed with, moving to catch up with the rest of her kith, tossing a 'panahedan' over her shoulder.  
  
Now she kneels, cold stone beneath her knees and wonders where she is, why she is bound, where are Valo-kas, where is she. Her hand glows and the two Chantry women (the angry one from Nevarra, the other one Orlesian) shout and explain and then she looks up at the sky.  
  
"Asit tal-eb," she murmurs after they meet the elf and dwarf and the rift closes, the magic vibrating through her. It is to be.

**Author's Note:**

> Minor edits because I'm going with the in-engine description of a female Shokrakar


End file.
